Sunday, July 3, 2011

Some Kind of Innocence is Measured Out in Years

I have decided to stop adding my SDF Macross episode reviews to the thread at AnimeSuki. I found myself unable to meet the deadlines each week, and that my material never generated any strong responses. That second thing isn’t by itself any reason to quit doing something, but I am just not in the groove for this particular task. I have plenty of time on the weekends, and I love Super Dimensional Fortress Macross as much as I ever did, but I’m just not feeling the urge to review the series again in point form.

In fact, I’ve decided to take a hiatus from blogging about Macross and/or Robotech for a while. I am not going to tie myself to either being back or never returning. This could be the final swan song for my active participation in both fandoms, or it could be another rest period. I have no way of knowing, and reserve the right to return whenever I wish.

I’m not going to go cold turkey. There are also things I could write and still write about, and the temptation to do so gnaws at me, but is currently easy to resist. I will respond to any statements I come across that seem worth my while to discuss, and keep an eye open for some good merchandise, but I want to write about some other things for a while.

The instabilities inherent in my interest in both properties also remain and will never be resolved. That’s partly because I refused to change my desires to match with the reality of the canon, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I wasn’t being unreasonable in what I expected to happen, and that it’s all right to disagree with creators. In various ways, the Macross and Robotech series made a hash of the Zentradi after SDFM, and that soured my fandom experience. I was further crushed to discover that absolutely no one in the Macross fandom was interested in the Zentradi characters, the fandom entirely lacking in that small core of interest in the secondary characters that every other one hand.

These facts still sting a little, and are proof that I’m not entirely dead.

So, it’s not that this instability became too much to bear; the experience with both fandoms remains both a joy and a chore in many different ways. But I’m running out of steam, and witnessing an enormous dust-up in my circle of friends in Robotech fandom further sucked the juice right out of me. Thus, I need a break, to take a (relatively) more placid, passive view of the material for a while.